LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner listens to speakers during a press conference at LinkedIn corporate headquarters on Thursday, March 10, 2011 in Mountain View, Calif. LinkedIn launched the beta of LinkedIn Today, a social news product.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner listens to speakers during a press...

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A member of the media looks on as LinkedIn Maps is featured during a news conference in Mountain View, California, U.S., on Thursday, March 10, 2011. LinkedIn Corp. has more than 1,000 employees and 90 million users in more than 200 countries. Members use the site to search for jobs, recruit employees and find industry experts. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

LinkedIn Corp. has launched a personalized, member-driven news service, one of several new products designed to promote the professional social network as more than just an online database of business contacts.

Called LinkedIn Today, the beta product aggregates the most popular headlines and news links that LinkedIn members are sharing on the network or by Twitter.

The news, also available on LinkedIn's updated iPhone app, can be filtered by 22 specific industries, by company, by geography or by the member's own professional circle.

Senior product manager Liz Walker said the firm believes the news-aggregation service could become an important career tool.

"In five minutes, they get the top stories they need to be paying attention to," she said. "Part of who you are is what you read or what you care about."

The Mountain View firm has more than 90 million members and is adding new members at a rate of about one per second. And those members are posting about 1 million updates per day.

But analysts say the challenge for LinkedIn, which has filed plans to go public this year, is to get its members more deeply engaged in the network, other than just dropping by once in a while to update their business profile or accept a new contact.

"This is a big step forward for them in terms of the relationship they have with their users," said Susan Etlinger, a consultant with the Altimeter Group in San Mateo.

Social media king Facebook Inc. of Palo Alto has found news sharing to be one of the most engaging activities for its estimated 600 million members.

Deep Nishar, LinkedIn senior vice president of products and user experience, said the company doesn't want to become just the Facebook for business.

"What we're focused on doing is not just limited to the activity stream," Nishar said. "Managing your career is a lot more than finding your next job. It's about how to stay up to speed, how you stay on top of your professional game."

LinkedIn also said that business news services Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal Digital Network and CNN Money have added a LinkedIn Share button to speed sharing of stories on LinkedIn Today. (The Chronicle publishes the Business Report daily in a partnership with Bloomberg News.)

At a briefing Thursday for reporters and analysts, LinkedIn also highlighted data-analysis tools the company has previously released, including Signal, a way for members to fine-tune their search for relevant discussion on the network, and LinkedIn Skills, a beta service that shows what kind of talents and skills they may need to advance their careers.

Another tool, InMaps, lets members see a graphical representation of their networks so they can identify the most influential members.

Etlinger said LinkedIn Today reminds her of Flipboard, an iPad app that displays links from Facebook and Twitter in an interactive news magazine format. "It's customized news based on who I am," she said.

However, she said the combination of all the new services provides members with a more meaningful level of data analysis.

LinkedIn has "been good at collecting data, but not necessarily as strong at providing insight," she said. "Once you start building insight from the data, then the next natural step would be to find ways to market that. In a sense, they've become an analysis platform for your professional life."